Forgiveness
by astridelta
Summary: Team 7 one-shot. I'm not going to write a summary only because if I did it'd ruin the whole story. Rated T


I have one thing to say: I got bored. :p

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The last thing Sasuke remembered was Madara's rinnegan eyes before himself, the purple and black rings spinning and entrancing the raven while he was sucked into a deep, dense black...

Then...

...Darkness surrounded Sasuke on all sides, suffocating him and covering his eyes to the point where it hurt to try and see past the thick veil set before him.

"What is this?" Sasuke asked stiffly as he tried to make sense of the pitch black dimension he found himself floating in. Silence met him, and he slowly placed a palm on the hilt of his katana. "Where am I?" A quiet shriek replied the raven's question this time after a few moments of tense silence, shrill with terror and echoing around him. "Who's there," the Uchiha demanded, but refused to let himself feel the fear his body was yearning to exhibit. He had to be in control of his emotions, he had to be strong so he could destroy Konoha...

A different voice screamed this time, seemingly deeper than the first.

Attempting to step forward, Sasuke found that his foot passed through empty air and that he was seemingly floating in space, so he activated his sharnigan warily, thinking that this was a trap devised by Konoha to capture him. "It will take more than this to terrify me," Sasuke spat scathingly, a smirk rising to his lips when he thought of how he would end those miserable shinobi who had tortured his family, his brother, for so long. Then two distinct _thumps_ reached his ears, and then the raven was pushed forward by some unseen force to his knees, palms pressed to a waxed wooden floor and his lungs suddenly depleted of air, as if he had been running for a long time.

Panting, Sasuke looked up, and saw two red sharnigan eyes staring back at him through the gloom on the opposite side of the large room. A katana blade protruded into a beam of moonlight that shone in from a window to Sasuke's left, and a deeply rooted sense of terror wormed its way into his mind...but his expression stayed blank as he rose into a crouch. "My brother no longer scares me," Sasuke hissed, but drew his own sword nonetheless as his eyes trailed to the familiar figures of his father and mother, laying in their own blood on the floor.

Except the man and woman were not Fugakuand Mikoto Uchiha.

Refusing to let his eyes widen, Sasuke instead witnessed the limp form of Naruto Uzumaki draped over Sakura Haruno's torso like a pile of rags, blood seeping from a gash in his back to the floor, where it pooled around their limbs. Sakura's normally vibrant green eyes were now dull, devoid of any sign to life and blankly looking at the ceiling, her short pink hair splayed around her head and the tips dyed crimson. The Uchiha raised his eyes to where Itachi should have been at this point in the memory, but...

Itachi wasn't the one Sasuke saw.

Instead, he saw a shorter figure step into the moonlight, the pale hand connected to the katana blade coming into sight first, and then Sasuke's own face came into view while the Uchiha watched the blood drip from his own fingertips and sword to the floor. His own blood red eyes watched his face impassively as Sasuke stood slowly, each eyeing the other with equal caution. "What the hell is going on," Sasuke demanded, his eyes briefly flicking to Naruto and Sakura's cold forms.

_This has to be a dream, this has to be! _Sasuke thought while his own hand reached behind his back and pulled out a scroll, untying the red string around it and unraveling the parchment so it fell to the floor, rolling towards the real Uchiha slowly before coming to a stop at his feet. An image of a great orange fox was imprinted on the paper in black and crimson ink, front paws extending towards Sasuke's face and a look of sheer fury in those red, slitted eyes. Waves rolled around the fox's back paws, and the creature seemed to be inside a large cage with red bars, the doors swung open and at the thing's feet stood a young blonde, doubled over and clutching his stomach as if he were in pain.

Sasuke's eyes raised to meet his own, the other nodded slight back to the paper. His now onyx eyes went back to see this time an image of a cherry blossom tree, branches seeming to sway in the wind with petals floating away from it into a black background, representing a barren wasteland with an image of the same cherry blossom tree, but without it's petals...except for the blood red ones that hovered around a female with pink hair clutching the sides of her head, expression pulled into one of anguish and horror.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Sasuke growled and stepped forward. His own head nodded back to the paper, and when he looked this time he saw a great fire painted with golden colors seeming to whip around a raven-haired boy who was holding his right hand over his eyes and bending over, blood dripping from his abdomen and seeming to sizzle on the ground by his feet. Shock coursed through the Uchiha's veins when he realized that the person on the scroll was _himself_.

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out as the cold steel of a blade slid into his heart.

Gargled breaths escaped Sasuke's lips as blood dribbled from his chin, sharnigan watching sharnigan as his double twisted the blade in his chest deeper, more pain shooting up and down Sasuke's spine. Then the katana was drawn from his body, and he had no choice but to fall to the floor while his vision dimmed, focusing in on Naruto's and Sakura's long since dead forms, and for the first time since Itachi's death, a tear rolled down his cheek in remorse. "I'm...sorry..." Sasuke whispered...and then his eyes closed.

The next time they opened, Naruto and Sakura stood before him against a white background, grins adorning their faces as they embraced him. "We forgive you," they whispered, and Sasuke knew that finally, he could give up the revenge he had sought out for so long...away from the blackness that was the shinobi world.


End file.
